3 WAYS YOU'RE JUST HANDING OVER YOUR BEST TALENT TO THE COMPETITION BY NOT DOING EXIT INTERVIEWS

If you’re not doing exit interviews, you are essentially handing over your best talent to the competition. You might as well call up your biggest competing company and invite them over to hand select the employees they want to take and add to their team, to help build their business. That sounds absolutely ridiculous doesn’t it? Who would invite a competing company to come have totally free pick of their best brightest employees? Absolutely no one. But that’s exactly what so many small businesses, and even large businesses do when they either choose not to do exit interviews or even worse fail to do anything about any negative feedback that they receive from exit interviews. And with you best employees gone, how are you going to run your business, crush business goals and build an empire? It’s not going to happen. Not without good employees. So close the employee coifers people. It’s as easy as figuring out why employees are leaving, which is easy to discover by simply implementing a process of conducting exit interviews.

Exit interviews are part of the employee termination process. Exit interviews are often overlooked by both large businesses and small business. This is really a shame because this simple process provides a huge amount of super valuable information that can be used to decrease turnover in your business and make your company a magnet for top talent. It could be that many small businesses just don’t know what they are missing out on and how this tool can help their businesses. Which I completely get. Running a small business involves so much. However, I really don’t want that to be you. I want you to get in on the many ways that exit interviews can be a secret weapon for your small business. That’s what human resources consultants do, they keep you in the know about all the important stuff. So let’s talk about four ways that I often see small businesses just handing over their best talent to the competition by not doing exit interviews.

#1 You're ignoring the most honest feedback you'll ever get from an employee.

Let’s be real here, even if you ask your employees or conduct employee satisfaction surveys the information you receive is probably not 100% honest. And this makes sense. Employees don’t want to risk retaliation or losing their jobs by voicing opinions about your small business. When employees are not happy with a company instead of trying to make a change where they are, they leave to a company  and environment, pay, schedule or opportunities that meets their preferences. This all changes when an employee has made the decision to leave your company and turned in a resignation. They no longer have anything to lose. They are out the door and possibly welcome the chance to share their reason for leaving more candidly. If you don’t tap into this opportunity, you won’t know why they are leaving. There could be many other employees thinking about going to the competition for the same reasons. You’re just opened the door a little wider for the mass exodus of employees to be open to employment elsewhere.

#2 You're not finding out why good people are leaving your business or doing anything to stop it.

Some employees you want to leave. That’s called good attrition. Other’s are major assets and your small business benefits tremendously from their contributions. Here’s the thing about good employees, those star performers, they know they are good employees and star performers. They know they are awesome. They know their worth. They know when they are getting what deserve and they can spot better opportunities. So if you’re not competitive in the areas that your best employees find important then you’re at risk of those employees, the ones you need, of moving on. Don’t make assumptions about what these employees find important either. It’s easy to say that employees want more pay, while that’s a factor, and employees will have different values that make them stay with or leave an employer. The danger is the not knowing. You can’t correct something that you’re not aware of. You can only be aware of something if you don’t ask. Once you know, then plans can be put into action, changes can be made that will make your small business a competitive and desirable employer that not only attracts exceptional people but makes them want to stay with your business and less likely to be swayed by the competition.

#3 You aren't making examining the impact that managers have on turnover or helping them to become leaders

There is a very true saying shared in management circles. You may have heard it or seen it floating around on your social media feeds.That saying is, people don’t leave businesses, they leave bad managers. Do you have bad bosses on your team? If you’re not doing exit interviews, you may not know this is even happening. Employees respond to bad management by leaving. Once exit interviews are in place, not taking action on management issues will do nothing to impact turnover. If you have managers that lack skill, treat employees unfairly or poorly, or maybe even harassing employees, it's either time to provide training,  mentoring or making changes to your team. In cases where you don’t have a management team and you directly manage employees, if you are receiving feedback about management, you may need to consider objectively reviewing your leadership methods and adjusting based on the responses collected.

All of these points can totally be corrected. The first step is to actually start using exit interviews in your business. Doing so consistently with every voluntary termination will provide you with essential information for you business. You can easily get started with exit interviews. All you need is the actual exit interview. You can grab one here and save the time figuring out what to ask and then creating the interview. This exit interview is a Microsoft Word download so you can customize it anyway you want. So with this resources, you can start using exit interviews in less than five minutes. It’s so easy there is no excuse not to start the process today.

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DO YOU CURRENTLY USE  EXIT INTERVIEWS OR PLAN TO START? TELL ME IN THE COMMENTS.